In an earlier post, I discussed the value of podcasting for public engagement in providing unexpected opportunities for networking. This post will expand on that particular point, with a focus on how academic podcasting opens up possibilities for collaboration in recruiting a production team, conducting interviews, and gaining publicity.

After taking some initial steps to plan the target audience, format, and theme of your podcast, it is worth considering whether your podcast could be a useful vehicle for new collaborations. One of the many appealing things about podcasting is that it only takes one person to launch a podcast: you.

So from a public engagement perspective, podcasting presents exciting opportunities for individuals. Much academic work is intensely solitary, and perhaps particularly in the humanities, the predominance of the monograph in the realm of publication epitomises this rule. A podcast can certainly be produced by a single author, but it doesn’t have to be. And it can, in fact, be interactional and interdisciplinary in spaces where collaboration is uncommon.

You can start with your team.

For RightsUp, we began with an interdisciplinary team. Although the podcast is based at the Oxford Human Rights Hub, and two of our producers are lawyers, I joined the team as a doctoral student in Oriental Studies with no legal training. We found that an interdisciplinary team was essential in achieving our core goal: communicating legal concepts to an audience of experts and non-experts. Our experience proved that we could become better communicators in our audio format precisely because we had to first communicate with one another in the production team.

And if you don’t have a particular skill or expertise, just find someone who does. Perhaps you have a great idea for a podcast, but audio production is not your cup of tea. Rather than letting the technical details stand in the way, consider using this as an opportunity to find a collaborator who has audio production experience or is enthusiastic to learn.

Include interviews, guests, or panelists.

In addition to collaboration in the production team, podcasts present exciting opportunities to meet colleagues and trailblazers in various fields as guests and interviewees. Diverse voices make for engaging podcasts – in both cadence and content. Inviting other experts to participate in a podcast can invigorate a topic with fresh insights and also provide those experts with a new platform to share with their own networks.

There are numerous ways to incorporate guests in both scripted and unscripted podcasts, from serving as interviewees on a specific issue or topic to guest producing an entire episode. While working on RightsUp, we made many “cold calls” to possible interviewees and received an overwhelmingly positive response and high levels of participation. The moral of the story is not to underestimate the power of podcasting when it comes to connecting with new people.

Find partners for promotion.

Once you have produced a podcast, garnering an audience means generating publicity. Posting your podcast on platforms like Oxford Podcasts and iTunesU can go a long way, but the more channels through which you can share your podcast, the better. Collaborating in the production team as well as in the podcast itself (in the form of interviews, panelists, or guests) offers more opportunities to share your podcast in different, interdisciplinary networks, as your collaborators share and promote the podcast themselves.

In some cases, another institution or department may also be interested in sharing your podcast if the theme is relevant or if someone from the institution participated in the production. For example, share your podcast with funding bodies and academic divisions, and ask them to spread the word on their social media accounts. Collaboration at every stage of the process helps to build momentum for promotion and publicity at the end, when you’re ready to broadcast.

]]>https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/collaborating-for-academic-podcasts-teamwork-interviews-and-publicity/feed/03368887656_401d977640_beamknightkira-squareSharing Space in the Early Modern World, 1450-1750: a two-day interdisciplinary conferencehttps://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/sharing-space-in-the-early-modern-world-1450-1750-a-two-day-interdisciplinary-conference/
https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/sharing-space-in-the-early-modern-world-1450-1750-a-two-day-interdisciplinary-conference/#respondMon, 25 Jul 2016 10:06:37 +0000http://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/?p=225Martin Christ (DPhil History, Balliol College, University of Oxford) reflects on the recent conference ‘Sharing Space in the Early Modern World, 1450-1750′, a two-day interdisciplinary conference held on 24th/ and 25th of June 2016, organised by Róisín Watson, Lucy Rayfield, Martin Christ, and partly funded by the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund.The Dom St. Petri, Bautzen, a church shared between Lutherans and Catholics.

In the last fifty years space has become an important analytical tool for the study of history. Almost all space in the early modern world was shared between different ethnicities, genders, classes or social statuses. These sites of contact were spaces in which ideology and religious beliefs were tempered by practical considerations. And, while there has been significant research on space, less attention has been paid to the negotiations involved in these shared spaces. What did it mean to share a space with other people, objects, and even animals? How did this impact the function of the space and its meaning?

The conference, held at the History Faculty, considered shared spaces from a number of different angles and papers explored sacred spaces shared by multiple confessions, spatial interactions between native communities and foreigners in the New World, ships as sites of shared knowledge, and the encounters of different groups at courts or in taverns. Whether these spaces were experienced separately or simultaneously by groups, their meaning was defined not just by their use, but by the religion, class, gender or ethnicity of those that experienced them. Their meanings were often in a state of flux.

This conference considered the ways in which early modern communities used shared space to define their individual and group identities, as well as their relationships with one another. The keynote speech by David Luebke (University of Oregon) explored sacred spaces and how they could be shared in the Westphalia, Germany. ‘Space’ is not just a geographical phenomenon, but as a reflection of social, political, and cultural relationships that were historically contingent. Abstract notions of space might be defined by cartographers or explorers of the new world, but, in a local context, it was defined by those who used shared spaces. Its meanings were actively constructed and manipulated by those that used them so that understandings of space were culturally conditioned.

The conference brought together scholars working in theology, history, art history, English literature and modern and medieval languages. As such, the conversions were broad and the conference enabled scholars from different countries, universities and academic backgrounds to engage in fruitful conversations.

]]>https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/sharing-space-in-the-early-modern-world-1450-1750-a-two-day-interdisciplinary-conference/feed/0Crocinus_PetrikircheeamknightThe Dom St. Petri, Bautzen, a church shared between Lutherans and Catholics. Zero to Podcast: Turning Your Research into an Audio Programmehttps://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/zero-to-podcast-turning-your-research-into-an-audio-programme/
https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/06/27/zero-to-podcast-turning-your-research-into-an-audio-programme/#respondMon, 27 Jun 2016 08:52:09 +0000http://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/?p=213In her second blog post, Kira Allman offers advice on turning your research into an engaging podcast.

If you’re increasingly convinced that podcasting is a great tool for public engagement, you might be contemplating how to get started. Translating academic research into an audio programme may initially seem daunting, but the process is really only a variation on skills that many researchers are already exercising in the form of conference presentations, lectures, and seminars. Like any formal talk, podcasting is most effective when it is well planned, which means making key decisions about audience, format, and theme.

Audience.

Knowing your audience is perhaps the most important preparatory step in creating your podcast. Start by asking: who will be listening? Not only will your audience affect how you present information, but it might also influence what you choose to talk about. Academic podcasting may have many different target listeners: academics in your field, academics in other disciplines, the general public, school children, policy makers, etc.

The tone of a podcast will differ greatly depending on who will be tuning in. This TORCH post is part of a series on podcasting, informed by my own experience developing the RightsUp podcast for the Oxford Human Rights Hub. We wanted RightsUp to be a programme on human rights for informed and interested non-experts as well as policy makers and other academics. As we learned, structuring a podcast for non-experts requires including more context, more explanation, and more signposting throughout an episode than you would for an audience of academic colleagues.

Most importantly, remember that your audience is listening to your programme. In the absence of visual aids, podcasts benefit tremendously from repetition and simple sentence structure. Multi-clausal sentences may work well on paper, but they are difficult to follow in an aural format. Clear transitions from one segment or topic to another and repeated themes provide indispensible guiding auditory markers for listeners to follow.

Format.

There are countless ways to structure a podcast, and the best method for deciding which format is most appealing to you and the subject you’re covering is to listen to a few successful podcasts of all flavors and varieties. Fundamentally, podcasts break down broadly into scripted and unscripted formats.

In scripted podcasts, the entirety of the audio content that will be recorded has been pre-written ahead of time. Scripted podcasts may take an interview-based narrative form, or they may take the form of a single-author essay. Unscripted podcasts, on the other hand, are generally more free flowing and conversational and often involve live commentary from a few individuals or panelists. Scripted or unscripted, podcasts universally require planning and editing.

You can hit the ground running quickly with podcasting by using the structure of an existing lecture series or conference as the format of your podcast. Simply record a public talk, acquire the appropriate permissions, edit it for sound quality, and post it online. iTunesU arguably made its name doing just that, and it’s a powerful way to give people access to university talks.

Theme.

The theme is the glue that holds your podcast series together. If you are producing a single podcast episode, think of the theme as the thesis statement of your episode – it is the reason that listeners will want to tune in.

If you are producing a series of podcasts, the theme is the source of inspiration for each specific episode topic, which may vary widely. Framing your theme is crucial in attracting and hooking a wide audience. This framing may take the form of a catchy title or an intriguing tagline, but the goal is to retain a loyal audience of subscribers who will listen to more than one episode, even if they are unfamiliar with certain episode topics.

Spending time thinking about audience, format, and theme at the beginning of your podcasting project will pay off later in the concept development and production stages. It will set the course for your audio programme and provide the guiding principles that you can return to as you work on individual episodes.

Kira Allman is a DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies and co-produced a podcast series called RightsUp funded by the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund. See here for here first post on this blog: ‘Podcasting for Public Engagement: Why Podcast?’

Despite a wealth of scholarship examining the place of nonhuman animals within the humanities over the last few decades, there has seemed to be a reluctance to critically engage with the term ‘vegan.’ However, the publication of Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project last year, alongside the growing sense of veganism’s urgent relevance to current ethical and environmental debates outside of the academy, as signalled by the UN’s urge for a global move towards meat and dairy-free diets, seems to signal the contemporary period as a seminal moment in the emergence of veganism as a significant field of critical enquiry and study. The Towards a Vegan Theory conference was hosted with the intention of bringing a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives into conversation in order to benefit from, and develop, the heterogenous ways we might understand, theorise, and write about what it might mean to be vegan.

The overwhelming response to our call for papers, with speakers working across literature, history, history of art, theology, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and across multiple institutions and continents, far surpassed all our expectations. Across such a wide berth of disciplines, it was particularly interesting to note the recurrence of the theme of failure, from failed witness to failed writing practices, which came to bear on an equally palpable emphasis on personal stories, visceral responses, and emotions. The conference allowed these ideas to emerge in dialogue with a broad range of approaches, from envisaging a vegan writing practice to a vegan mode of art history, and spark a wide range of discussion and debate.

The success of the conference, we hope, attests to a growing scholarly engagement with the nascent field of vegan theory. Furthermore, attendance from a wide range of delegates, including many from non-academic backgrounds, and aided by our ability to open Laura Wright’s conference to the wider public, signalled the relevance of these themes beyond the Academy. Indeed, the conference attracted attention from several journalists and we are thrilled to be featured in the upcoming edition of Vegan Life magazine.

The conference itself ran remarkably smoothly and we received many positive comments about the safe-space environment provided and the liberatory feeling of presenting a paper without having to first justify a vegan perspective to traditionally skeptical, or hostile, academic audiences.
The generous support of both the TORCH and the Vegan Society granted us invaluable experience in putting together an academic conference. We hope to do justice to this support by ensuring the conference maintains a significant legacy. For example, we are keen to turn a selection of essays from the conference into an edited collection, building on the success of Laura Wright’s foundational work, and increasing the number of voices and perspectives in the debate. Building on the success of bringing such an international array of speakers together, we’re also intending to apply for the TORCH New Network Scheme, with the hope of establishing a hub for vegan theory research at Oxford.

Thanks must be given to TORCH, the UK Vegan Society, Laura Wright, all of our wonderful speakers and delegates, and our organising team Katharine Westwood and Laura Davies.

The Oxonian Review of Books was founded as a termly print magazine at Balliol College, Oxford, in 2001. In January 2009, we relaunched as The Oxonian Review, an online biweekly magazine, which is published on Mondays during Oxford term-time. We feature essays and reviews of recently published work in literature, politics, history, science, and the arts, and creative submissions such as photo essays, poetry, short stories and artwork. The Oxonian Review consists of two parts: the biweekly main issue, and shorter pieces published throughout the week, called ORbits. The Editor in Chief and the ORbits editor are appointed for a term, and leave a distinct mark on their term’s publications. The fourth and final publication of each term is a special issue, the theme of which is determined by the Editor in Chief: usually, they align it with their own research interests. Recent themes have been Poetics and Moving Pictures, and in Trinity 2016, the theme will be Translation. The Oxonian also holds an annual poetry competition; we publish the winning poem and the runners-up in a special issue. The winner is selected by an established poet: last year, this was Jamie McKendrick.

The wide readership – around four hundred readers a day – means that the Oxonian is an excellent place for new authors to be noticed, both as academics and as creative writers. Many contributors use the Oxonian to write for a wide audience on topics related to their own research interests, especially historians and literature and film researchers. Among those who have written for us, many have since been published in national publications, such as Tom Chatfield, a noted writer and commentator on digital culture; Adam Harper, author of Infinite Music; and Alex Niven, author of Folk Opposition. The Oxonian also frequently features interviews with artists, academics, and other public figures. Notable interviewees include poet and author Alan Hollinghurst, Paralympic athlete Nikki Emerson, and literary critic Terry Eagleton.

The magazine is published by graduate members of the University of Oxford, although it is open to contributions from other University members and non-Oxford affiliates, as well as from talented undergraduates. The Oxonian Review takes pride in providing thorough editorial guidance for first-time writers, teaching its contributors how to write for a non-specialist audience. All submitted articles are subject to a rigorous editing process: every accepted piece is likely to undergo multiple rounds of editing. In the editing process, we look for clarity and accessibility as well as depth and rigour. We assume an intelligent, interested audience, capable of understanding a sustained discussion, but not necessarily familiar with the terms used in a specific field. For reviews, we look for pieces that include a balanced, contextual discussion of the work and a well-articulated response. Our reviews are frequently featured on publishers’ and authors’ websites.

Editors can apply via an open call, and are supervised by the ORbits editor and Editor in Chief. With a large number of submissions to go through every term, editors soon gain the skills necessary for careers in editorial positions. The Editor in Chief and the ORbits editor also learn how to manage an entire online publication by themselves, including managing issue deadlines and preparing an issue for publication in WordPress. The editorial staff, including the Editor in Chief, is not paid. The website costs were paid out of pocket by staff members, until in 2015 the then Editor in Chief, Kristin Grogan, and the ORbits Editor, Kanta Dihal, applied for a grant from the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund. This grant covers the website hosting costs, as well as publicity material to attract new writers and editors, for the next two years.

]]>https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/06/03/writing-for-a-wider-audience-the-oxonian-review-oxfords-graduate-literary-magazine/feed/1srtXUiJjeamknightoxonianlogo_700Podcasting for Public Engagement: Why Podcast?https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/podcasting-for-public-engagement-why-podcast/
https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/podcasting-for-public-engagement-why-podcast/#commentsMon, 16 May 2016 16:06:42 +0000http://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/?p=167Last year, Kira Allmann (DPhil candidate in Oriental Studies) co-produced a podcast series called RightsUp funded by the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund. Here, she tells us why podcasting is a great public engagement tool.Kira speaking at the AHRC-TORCH Public Engagement Summer School in 2015

Academics often face a challenge when it comes to reaching beyond the ivory tower and sharing their research with a wider audience. And it’s become increasingly important to think about public engagement at every stage in an academic career for reasons that range from the intellectual to the practical – sharing information and expertise, inspiring interest in our subject areas, gaining exposure in our fields, and seeking out funding and employment opportunities. Public engagement helps keep academic researchers plugged into the wider world around them, and that leads to more innovative research and new avenues for collaboration and constructive feedback. But the question always arises: how to engage a broader public?

Kira, Laura and Max being awarded AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund support

In this post, I want to make the case for podcasting as a creative, flexible and compelling tool for academic public engagement. Essentially, podcasting is episodic radio programming for the Internet: audio (and sometimes video) content available at any time, anywhere, just a click away. Last year, I began co-producing, along with Laura Hilly and Max Harris, a podcast series called RightsUp for the Oxford Human Rights Hub. We received a small grant from the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund to launch the series and produce several episodes. We learned many valuable lessons in producing the series, which explores global perspectives on human rights issues in an accessible format. Based on that experience, today I’ll cover three key reasons why podcasting is so well suited to public engagement.

Affordability.

Academics, and especially research students, frequently operate on tight budgets (we’ve all been there), and finding funding for large projects requiring technical expertise can be difficult. Podcasting is supremely affordable, and anyone – yes, anyone – with a computer, a recording device, and no prior experience can create a podcast.
You can create a high-quality podcast at home with tools that you likely already own, such as a laptop, a smartphone, or a simple audio recorder. No high tech equipment is necessary, as most reporters’ recorders come with USB connectivity and most smartphones have a built-in recording feature. For RightsUp, we used iPhone’s Voice Memos. If you want to boost the sound quality of your recordings, a few low-cost purchases can go a long way, such as a lapel microphone that connects to your recording device.

After recording raw audio, the editing process is easier than ever with free, open source software like Audacity, which allows you to edit your recordings like a pro with countless online manuals and YouTube tutorials.

Producing a podcast can be done at very little financial cost, so the only resource you then need to allocate toward creating your podcast is time.

Accessibility

Podcasting is ideal for public engagement because the online audio format is extremely easy to share. Podcasts are simply audio files, and they can be broadcast on platforms such as Oxford University’s iTunesU account, a departmental website, hosting sites like Soundcloud, or even your own website or blog. Once your podcast has been posted, you can share it far and wide with a URL on social media, e-mail, or your CV.

But accessibility is about more than just the mechanics of posting and sharing. It’s also about repackaging your research material into short, conversational programmes that can be understood and enjoyed by disciplinary experts and non-experts alike. Creating a podcast is a worthwhile intellectual exercise in presenting subject material in an engaging way that can be digested by listeners who are unfamiliar with discipline-specific jargon and who may have no prior experience of the subject material.

Connectivity.

Finally, podcasts are a powerful tool for connecting and building relationships with other people in your field and beyond. There are many ways to structure a podcast, and listening to popular existing podcasts is a great way to explore the formats that seasoned podcasters are using. Regardless of what format you use, from a single-author essay to a panel show, podcasting offers opportunities to network with people and communities that you might not otherwise reach easily.

RightsUp is a scripted narrative podcast built around interviews with experts, activists and academics working in human rights. We found that doing interviews for the podcast gave us a channel through which to reach out to leaders in various human rights fields, who were almost universally enthusiastic to participate. After all, a podcast is a platform for your interviewees to be heard, too. Further, everyone you interview will likely want to share your podcast with their circles of colleagues and friends, increasing your impact. (Quick note: always remember to consider interview ethics when conducting podcast interviews. You must obtain consent from interviewees for their audio to be used in a podcast, and the University provides a downloadable consent form for this purpose.)

After hearing your podcast, listeners may contact you as they encounter topics that interest them, and some of those listeners may become future collaborators or professional colleagues. Podcast listeners often ‘subscribe’ to a podcast feed in order to receive updates when new episodes are available, so podcasting can help you build a regular, committed audience that will also tune in when you have other content or announcements to share, such as published articles, books, or guest lectures.

RightsUp has benefitted from all three of these core strengths of podcasting: affordability, accessibility, and connectivity. Podcasts are an engaging and adaptable medium for finding a wider audience, communicating topics that interest you, and bolstering your professional presentation and digital outreach skills. Just click, record and share.

This is the first of a series of posts on podcasting by Kira.

]]>https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/podcasting-for-public-engagement-why-podcast/feed/1kira-squareeamknightTORCH-podcasting-talk-kiraKira-Laura-Max-TORCH-awardsWomen and the Canon: An Interdisciplinary Conference https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/women-and-the-canon-an-interdisciplinary-conference/
https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/women-and-the-canon-an-interdisciplinary-conference/#commentsWed, 11 May 2016 11:53:25 +0000http://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/?p=150David Bowe (Victoria Maltby JRF, Somerville College, University of Oxford) reflects on the recent conference ‘Women and the Canon‘, partly funded by the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund.

Back in the summer of last year, planning was underway for a small study day, ‘Women and the Canon’, focussing on the intersections between gender and cultural authority. Julia Hartley, Adele Bardazzi, Natalya Din-Kariuki and I had sent out the call for papers and we were waiting with baited breath for the proposals to come in. And they kept coming in. At the final tally we had received over one hundred abstracts and as we set about making our selections, the high quality and number of proposals made it clear that we could, indeed should, hold a much larger event. As the conference grew in scope, into a two-day event with parallel sessions, we were grateful for the funding that was provided by a range of sources, the Italian Sub-Faculty and ICI Berlin fund, the English Faculty, Christ Church, the KE Seed Fund, and the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund.

The range of contributions was engaging and provocative, from Elena Lombardi’s opening keynote on medieval women readers, via papers on early modern anthologies, modern art, music, and the presence (absence) of women in syllabi and curricula. We were all struck by the real sense of collaborative effort which emerged through the conference discussion, as researchers and artists spoke directly to the key questions gathered under the heading ‘Women and the Canon’ from their various disciplinary backgrounds. Common ground was found for exchange between social scientists and art historians, medievalists and musicians, and many of us left not just with new ideas, but with plans of action, considerations for new syllabi and new ways of going about our work.

Thanks to the KE Seed Funding we were also able to incorporate artistic responses as part of the conference discussion, with work by Sara Masinaei (visual artist) and Helen MacKinnon (composer), who probed the conference themes with their artistic work and presentations.

The Graduate Fund helped to ensure that everyone was kept well-fed and the conviviality of our shared meals allowed the conference conversations to roll on through lunch breaks and over dinner, to great effect. Looking back on the conference now, we’re delighted and proud of the discussion that took place and we have been prompted to keep that discussion going through our TORCH Network, co-funded by the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute, ‘Gender and Authority’. With this venture we continue on the cross-disciplinary course of the original conference, bringing together researchers from different fields, institutions, and career stages to continue thinking critically about the role of gender and authority in texts, artefacts, disciplines, and societies.

Our next Gender and Authority event will be a seminar on 1 June 2016 at Somerville College, with Lynn Ellen Burkett (Western Carolina University) and Alexis Brown (University of Oxford).

Former TORCH Graduate Project Coordinators, Adele Bardazzi and Alexis Brown, discuss their experience of managing the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund and developing the first Public Engagement Summer School in 2015.

We began developing the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund and the 5-day long 2015 Public Engagement Summer School as a part of an internship at the Humanities Division during the summer of 2014, under the direction of Dr. John Miles, Humanities Training Officer. This was a real opportunity to develop two projects from the ground up. No other university had developed a student-led student initiative fund, for students by students. There had also never been a public engagement summer school in Oxford before, despite the fact that many researchers here were doing fantastic work across a variety of disciplines. These projects began as reports developed for the Division, outlining our plans and designs for how they might be implemented. We then had the wonderful opportunity to see these projects through to completion as Graduate Project Coordinators in the autumn of that year.

This was when the real challenge began: how were our designs going to stand up against the test of students expectations and the reality of implementation? We first had to develop training for the Student Peer Review College, the members of which would be crucial in reviewing applications and allocating funding. We prepared and delivered a peer review training session in November for interested students, which also included a session on how to put together an effective application. The fund had four streams: a journal, podcast, conference, and public engagement project. We received an impressive breadth of applications from across the humanities, and the Peer Reviewers did an excellent job assessing and providing feedback for each of the applications. What was truly unique about this process was that it was as much a learning experience for those students reviewing applications as it was for the students who applied, whether or not they received funding. All involved left the process with a much better idea of what made for a successful funding application and sustainable project across a variety of disciplines. We were finally able to fund several exciting projects, including a conference on Arab Nahda in its regional and global contexts and the RightsUp – Global Perspective on Human Rights podcast series, among others.

The AHRC-TORCH Summer School was an equally successful endeavour. It consisted of 5 days of skills workshops, lectures and small group sessions designed to furnish its 20 Oxford humanities participants with the skills to integrate public engagement into their research. Sessions focusing on online skills (WordPress, blogging, writing for different audiences, basic information about website development/coding) and presentation skills (TV, radio and other l presentations) helped prepare attendees to construct and deliver a pitch for their own public engagement project on the final day of the School, with the chance of receiving funding to pursue it in the coming year. We were able to award funding to three outstanding projects, including Ushashi Dasgupta’s generation rent and Dickens project, Lucy Busfield’s palaeography project, and Kanta Dihal’s and Sarah Griffin’s Museum of History of Science podcasting series. Participants reflected on their summer school experience in a video here.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this work, however, has been its sustainability. We very much look forward to seeing what the next generation of Graduate Project Coordinators, Rhea Sookdeosingh and Emily Knight, do with the Summer School and Graduate Fund going forward.

]]>https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/being-a-torch-graduate-project-coordinator/feed/0Torch University of Oxford History of Science OxfordeamknightTorch University of Oxford History of Science OxfordPoster AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund_DSC0003 copyPoster PE Summer School_DSC0062 copyWomen in Oxford’s History Podcast Serieshttps://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/women-in-oxfords-history-podcast-series-2/
https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/women-in-oxfords-history-podcast-series-2/#respondWed, 06 Apr 2016 13:29:17 +0000http://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/?p=129A chance meeting during a TORCH Women in the Humanities lunch in October 2015 sparked this project collaboration between Olivia Robinson and Alison Moulds. In January 2016 the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund awarded them funding to run a podcast series entitled Women in Oxford’s History. Here, they explain more about the project and its aims.

The history of Oxford is often told through the experiences of eminent men drawn from the aristocracy, the Church and academia, while the stories of ordinary women’s contributions to the city and the University remain neglected. Oxford’s blue plaque scheme, which commemorates the lives of people connected to the city, features just 8 women among a total of 38 plaques. Our podcast project aims to redress this balance by highlighting the role women have played in Oxford’s history. We hope to inspire others to investigate women’s impact on their own communities and cities.

The project involves producing a series of up to six podcasts on women whose contributions to either ‘town or gown’ life have been overlooked. It will showcase individuals whose lives are not widely known and whose names may be unfamiliar to many. These are not the Margaret Thatchers and Ada Lovelaces of the world, but are nonetheless women who have made important contributions to the city and university over the centuries, and who we feel deserve wider recognition.

Our contributors are postgraduate students at Oxford University in the fields of Anthropology, Creative Writing, Economic, Social and Local History. They are currently busy producing narrative accounts of individual women whom they’ve chosen for their connection to, and impact on, Oxford. In several cases, the advanced search facility at the Online Dictionary of National Biography was used to identify suitable women to research in more depth, and the subjects include women with interests in social work, race relations, women’s education and museum collections.

Once these narratives have been written, they will be adapted into more informal scripts suitable for audio recordings. The podcasts will be designed to appeal to a broad audience, people of all ages and backgrounds. We hope that they will attract interest beyond the University, from local schools and community groups and from international visitors. They might be listened to by a Year 11 student on her way to school, a young professional who listens to podcasts while running, or a retired American tourist planning to explore the city. Each podcast will last around 10 minutes and be available to download via the University’s podcast series on iTunes. A simple website will accompany the series, enabling us to share extra research resources. Look out for updates on Twitter @WomenOfOxford and we look forward to launching the finished podcast series in June 2016.

]]>https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/women-in-oxfords-history-podcast-series-2/feed/0Women in OxfordeamknightOlivia RobinsonAlison MouldsPutting your PE project into actionhttps://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/putting-your-pe-project-into-action/
https://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/putting-your-pe-project-into-action/#respondThu, 31 Mar 2016 12:14:18 +0000http://graduateprojectsoxford.wordpress.com/?p=117I spend most of my days poring over medieval manuscripts in the Weston library. I am very fortunate that my doctoral research involves working with medieval codices – every manuscript is unique and I never know what to expect when I turn the pages of the medieval book in front of me. The manuscripts I work with range from large and beautifully decorated deluxe manuscripts to hastily produced ones copied on paper. Studying these objects allows us to draw connections between the physical book and the culture in which they were produced, read and used.

The pleasure of looking at medieval manuscripts has not gone unnoticed – over the past few years, there has been an increased circulation of medieval manuscript illustrations on social media which has boosted the non-specialist’s interest in medieval books. However, working with medieval manuscripts requires a specialist set of skills: the modern-day user must be able to understand how the medieval book was produced and how to decipher the handwriting.

To bridge the gap between an interest in medieval manuscripts and the acquisition of the skills needed to interpret them, I have been offering a free Palaeography for Beginners course for the past three years. The course is kindly hosted by the Iris Project, an initiative which offers free courses for the general public. In this blog post I will share my experiences and offer advice to anyone interested in running a similar skills-based course.

Do your Research & Just Ask!

First of all, I wanted to find out whether similar courses existed. I found a number of online resources and the London Palaeography Summer School but I could not find a palaeography course that was free of charge in the Oxfordshire area. I was able to identify a gap in the market.

The next step involved networking with a potential host. At the time I was attending a Latin for Beginners course at the East Oxford Community Classics Centre, run by the Iris Project. As the Centre’s main focus lies in promoting the study of Latin and Greek, I didn’t know whether they would like my idea of offering a course in medieval handwriting. I arranged a meeting with the Iris Project’s coordinator, pitched my idea and to my surprise the coordinator told me that they would be happy to offer my course! So, if you’ve got an idea – be brave enough to share it with people.

Preparing your Course Material

My first class of the eight week course was approaching and I put a lot of thought into the preparation of my course material. One of the main things to remember was that I had to assume that none of the course participants had any prior knowledge of medieval manuscripts. For example, it was important to explain all terminology during my first lesson and to talk them through the basics of medieval manuscript production.

Giving my students homework (handing out photocopies of manuscripts plates) was essential because palaeography is a skill you need to hone constantly. However, I had to keep in mind that all of my students were volunteers so not asking for too much preparation was important.

Teaching

Each class, I focussed on a different script, ranging from the eighth to the fifteenth century. At the beginning of the class I provided students with a short introduction to the script we were about to cover and I drew distinctive letter shapes on the whiteboard. Then I’d ask participants to compare the transcriptions I had asked them to do as homework. At the end of each hour-long class participants would have a go at transcribing one word each.

The Benefits

I found the experience of being involved with public engagement through teaching palaeography very rewarding. It enabled me to gain valuable teaching experience and to communicate my research field to an audience I wouldn’t normally deal with in my day-to-day life as a doctoral researcher. I would highly recommend getting involved with public engagement during your graduate studies – it is an experience my development as a researcher has certainly benefitted from.

Sarah Laseke is a doctoral researcher at Leiden University working on scribal collaboration in fifteenth century manuscripts. She is also the AHRC DTP Administrative Assistant, Humanities Division, University of Oxford. You call follow her on twitter @aclerktherwas